 |
inShare1 |
Freak weather is not climate change… up to a point..when it suddenly becomes clear fromn all the evidnce, that runaway climate change is happening.
Finally we can join up the dots.
Jeremy Hance mongabay.com May 03, 2012
High school students in Texas connect the dots between climate change and tornados that appear earlier and earlier ever year. Scientists are just beginning to explore whether or not there is a connection between climate change and tornadoes. Photo courtesy of 350.org.
On Saturday, May 5th vulnerable populations from the United States to Bangladesh will “connect the dots” between devastating extreme weather and climate change in a global day of action organized by 350.org. The nearly 1,000 events occurring in over half of the world’s nations are meant to highlight to governments, media, and the public that climate change is impacting lives through an increase in number and intensity of devastating weather events, such as droughts, heatwaves, and floods.
“We just celebrated Earth Day. May 5 is more like Broken Earth Day, a worldwide witness to the destruction global warming is already causing,” said founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben, in a press release. “People everywhere are saying the same thing: our tragedy is not some isolated trauma, it’s part of a pattern.”
Haiti’s youth stand in flooded streets to connect the dots between climate change and severe floods. Photo courtesy of 350.org.
While scientists have long predicted that climate change will increase the number and the severity of particular types of extreme weather, recent research is increasingly finding that climate change has already “loaded the dice” for certain extreme weather events. In fact, a paper this year in Nature Climate Change found “strong evidence” of climate change worsening flooding, droughts, and heatwaves.
“Global warming can generally not be proven to cause individual extreme events—but in the sum of events the link to climate change becomes clear. It is not a question of yes or no, but a question of probabilities,” explained lead author, Dim Coumou, with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), in a press release.
Tajikistan’s water supplies are dwindling as glaciers melt and are not renewed by snowfall as in the past. Photo courtesy of 350.org.
Beyond the science, the rise in extreme weather events brings real human suffering. Last year, the U.S. suffered 12 weather events that caused a billion dollars each, including several that were probably exacerbated by a warmer world. Also in 2011, Thailand experienced its worst flooding on record with total damages exceeding $45 billion according to the World Bank, and South Korea experienced its wettest summer yet with floods killing 69 people in Seoul. But the greatest human toll last year was in East Africa. Failed rains pushed anarchic Somalia into famine, killing between 50,000 and 100,000 people, half of whom were likely children under five.
The last ten years has also seen Europe’s worst heatwave in at least 500 years (2003); England’s wettest summer since 1766 (2007); Russia’s warmest summer on record including unprecedented droughts and fires (2010); Pakistan’s worst flood disaster impacting 20 million people (2010); two record droughts in the Amazon rainforest (2005 and 2010); and meanwhile sea levels continue to rise, Arctic sea ice continues to decline, and most of the world’s glaciers are diminishing.
The island of Palau is seeing salty sea water swamp taro patches and erode beaches. Photo courtesy of 350.org.
Despite this, world governments have been slow to act on climate change with greenhouse gas emissions continuing to rise year after year. In addition, critics say that many in the media have ignored or obfuscated the issue. In the U.S., at least, coverage has dropped sharply since 2009, the year of the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, according to Media Matters. In addition, stories covering the politics of climate change far outnumber those covering the science.
Since the early 20th Century, global temperatures have risen approximately 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.44 degrees Fahrenheit) due to greenhouse gas emissions, which trap heat in the atmosphere. The past decade (2000-2009) was the warmest on record, while 2010 and 2005 are generally considered the warmest years on record (not 1998 as is often cited). In fact, the Earth hasn’t experienced a single year below the 20th Century average since 1975. While governments have pledged to keep global temperatures rising above 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the International Energy Agency warned last month that global society was on track to raise temperatures “at least” 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit), a rise that scientists warn would cataclysmic for Earth’s ecosystems and human society.
In Jaora, India, key water supplies are running dry during longer and longer periods of drought. Photo courtesy of 350.org.
Related articles
U.S. suffers warmest March, breaking over 15,000 record temperatures
(04/11/2012) March was the warmest ever recorded in the U.S. with record-keeping going back to 1895, according to new data by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But the month wasn’t just a record-breaker, it was shockingly aberrant: an extreme heatwave throughout much of the eastern and central U.S. shattered 15,272 day and nighttime records across the U.S. In all March 2012 was 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit above the previous warmest March in 1910, and an astounding 8.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th Century average for March in the U.S.
“Strong evidence” linking extreme heatwaves, floods, and droughts to climate change
(03/28/2012) As North America recovers from what noted meteorologist Jeff Masters has called “the most incredible spring heatwave in U.S. and Canadian recorded history,” a new paper argues that climate change is playing an important role in a world that appears increasingly pummeled by extreme weather. Published in Nature Climate Change, the paper surveys recent studies of climate change and extreme weather and finds “strong evidence” of a link between a warming world and the frequency and intensity of droughts, floods, and heatwaves—such as the one that turned winter into summer in the U.S.
Tornado season likely to expand due to climate change
(03/06/2012) Last Friday, around a hundred tornadoes left a wake of destruction in the U.S., killing 39 people to date and destroying entire towns. The tragedy hit hardest in Kentucky and Indiana and experts predict the weather-disaster will cost over $1 billion. But isn’t this early for tornado season? Yes, say experts, and climatologists add that while research on tornadoes and climate change is currently in its infancy, it’s possible, probably even likely, that climate change is expanding tornado season in the U.S. due to the earlier arrival of spring.
Earth systems disruption: Does 2011 indicate the “new normal” of climate chaos and conflict?
(12/21/2011) The year 2011 has presented the world with a shocking increase in irregular weather and disasters linked to climate change. Just as the 2007 “big melt” of summer arctic sea ice sent scientists and environmentalists scrambling to re-evaluate the severity of climate change, so have recent events forced major revisions and updates in climate science.
Texas loses half a billion trees to epic drought
(12/21/2011) A punishing drought in Texas has not only damaged crops, killed cattle, and led to widespread fires, but has also killed off a significant portion of the state’s trees: between 100 and 500 million trees have perished to drought stress according to preliminary analysis. The estimate does not include tree mortality caused by fires. The drought has been linked to La Niña conditions, which causes drying in the Southern U.S., and has likely been exacerbated by global climate change.
Philippines disaster may have been worsened by climate change, deforestation
(12/20/2011) As the Philippines begins to bury more than a 1,000 disaster victims in mass graves, Philippine President Benigno Aquino has ordered an investigation into last weekend’s flash flood and landslide, including looking at the role of illegal logging. Officials have pointed to both climate change and vast deforestation as likely exacerbating the disaster.
Another record breaker: 2011 warmest La Niña year ever
(11/30/2011) As officials meet at the 17th UN Climate Summit in Durban, South Africa, the world continues to heat up. The UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has announced that they expect 2011 to be the warmest La Niña year since record keeping began in 1850. The opposite of El Nino, a La Niña event causes general cooling in global temperatures.
Climate change already worsening weird, deadly, and expensive weather
(11/02/2011) Unprecedented flooding in Thailand, torrential rains pummeling El Salvador, long-term and beyond-extreme drought in Texas, killer snowstorm in the eastern US—and that’s just the last month or so. Extreme weather worldwide appears to be both increasing in frequency and intensity, and a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) connects the dots between wilder weather patterns and global climate change.
Chart: US suffers record drought
(08/01/2011) An exceptional drought is still scorching major parts of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. A new report from the National Drought Mitigation Center finds that over July, nearly 12 percent of the US saw exceptional drought conditions, the highest record since monitoring began a dozen years. Exceptional drought is the worst possible on a 5-scale drought scale.
Adaptation, justice and morality in a warming world
(07/28/2011) If last year was the first in which climate change impacts became apparent worldwide—unprecedented drought and fires in Russia, megaflood in Pakistan, record drought in the Amazon, deadly floods in South America, plus record highs all over the place—this may be the year in which the American public sees climate change as no longer distant and abstract, but happening at home. With burning across the southwest, record drought in Texas, majors flooding in the Midwest, heatwaves everywhere, its becoming harder and harder to ignore the obvious. Climate change consultant and blogger, Brian Thomas, says these patterns are pushing ‘prominent scientists’ to state ‘more explicitly that the pattern we’re seeing today shows a definite climate change link,’ but that it may not yet change the public perception in the US.
Read more: http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0503-hance-extreme-weather-activism-350.html#ixzz1tp6NC2Sj
-
A Happy Dot from the townships of South Africa
Posted: Thu, 03 May 2012 20:33:27 +0000
Learners at KwaBhekilanga Secondary School in
Alexandra break into song as the celebrate the harvest from their food
garden. These learners are connecting the dots between climate change and
food security as they develop their sustainable permaculture food garden. -
Pictures have been flooding in all week from Tajikistan
Posted: Thu, 03 May 2012 19:16:58 +0000
Because the NGO Cooperation for Development has been holding seminars in the 5 mountain villages of the Rasht Valley, which depend on melting glacier for their drinking water. And who knew that Tajikistan had the coolest bicycles on the planet?
-
If anyone has a right to talk about the melting Arctic, he’s the guy
Posted: Thu, 03 May 2012 19:13:05 +0000
Annapolis based sailor, Matt Rutherford recently made news by setting a
record for single-handedly circumnavigating the Americas in his sail boat.
His route took him through the fabled Northwest passage – a feat which was
unthinkable before the record ice melt of recent years. In this picture,
taken on board his sail boat in the Annapolis Harbor, he holds a “climate
dot” reading “Melting Arctic = Annapolis Floods”. In 2003 the Annapolis
Harbor and surrounding commercial area were inundated with by Hurricane
Irene’s storm surge. According to scientists that surge was a foot higher
than a similar storm’s surge 70 years earlier thanks to sea level rise. -
One of our first green dots arrives, from friends in Israel
Posted: Thu, 03 May 2012 19:09:15 +0000
Where they know that skates and bikes and busses are the wheels of the future!
-
Viewed from above, a stump sure looks like a dot
Posted: Thu, 03 May 2012 19:05:13 +0000
Weird weather is killing trees around the world–whether from freak snowstorms (this spring saw the latest-ever big storm in Oregon) or from afflictions like the pine-bark beetle, which can raise an extra generation each summer now because of warmer temperatures
-
Climate Impacts Day with a Twist
Posted: Thu, 03 May 2012 16:29:14 +0000
This post was written by Chris Garrard, who will be a key part of the action in London. To join him, sign up here.
Saturday morning, the start of the first weekend in May. Shoppers and workers bustle by. Beneath the imposing dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral is the churchyard. And there, at the centre, a Twister game is about to take place…
May 5th is Climate Impacts Day and OccupyLondon’s Environment Group and 350.org have joined forces to spread the word and make a stand. Our unique hand-painted Twister mat has added in the climate impacts, so players will place their “Right hand drought!” and then “Left foot flood!” As the game continues, players begin to connect the dots with their whole body, and start to build up the bigger picture. But Twister is just the start. It will be a vibrant day of talks and tours, discussion and a picnic, then a film screening and a photo stunt. What more could you want from a Climate Impacts Day?
In London, the offices of big business perpetuating environmental damage surround us. Under Big Ben, parliament debates and fails to take decisive action. The mainstream media on Fleet Street too often look the other way. For us, Climate Impacts Day is a prime opportunity not just to give information, but share it and invite others to participate. One of our speakers, Sabiha Teladia (Muslim Hands), has seen first hand the affects of flooding in Pakistan and Philippa de Boissiereand (UK tar sands Network) will tell us about why we must take action on dangerous fossil fuel extraction. Our day is about telling these powerful stories but posing questions too, showing people that once the dots have been connected, the environment is not something separate from them.
If people join us on our tour of “climate heroes and climate zeros”, they can get under the skin of business behaviours that are affecting the world’s poorest. Information and insight is a powerful thing – once you know there is a change to be made, it’s hard to turn your back. Many of us have already started, but on Saturday, Londoners will connect the dots.
-
More CO2 = Drying Wells
Posted: Thu, 03 May 2012 14:24:49 +0000
Nearly all the wells in the villages of Ranwal, Kutalpura and Sherpur around the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan, India are dry. Our local organizer, Govardhan Meena, who also runs the Tiger Express for Sanctuary Asia’s, Kids for Tigers programme helped spread awareness about the issue of climate change and connected the dots for many of the villagers. He talked about how extreme weather changes that they are witnessing are directly impacting the water levels and therefore, many of their wells are running dry.
The picture below is of the Meena family (Badudi, Kajodi, Moshmi,Foranti and Kali Meena) who are standing in their dry field as there is not enough water to grow their crops. Although their placards are clearly legible they say –
RISING TEMPERATURES LEAVE OUR WELLS DRY
MORE CO2 = HIGHER TEMPERATURE = OUR DRYING WELLS
And, here, in the village of Kutalpura, women walk through the village to one of the dried up wells holding “umbrella dots” signifying the rising heat to show solidarity with Climate Impacts Day on May 5, 2012.
-
Too Hot Not to Notice–new blog by Bill McKibben on Tom Dispatch.com
Posted: Thu, 03 May 2012 13:00:01 +0000
Cross-posted from Tomdispatch.com
By now, it’s already deep election season, the beginning of the culmination of a cyclethat commenced the day after (or even the day before) the previous presidential election. In the meantime, the endless polls appear — you can check Obama’s approval rating or the state of thepresidential horserace any time, night or day — and the media goes ballistic handicapping the odds or discussing the presidential cat fight. Each side’s handlers take out after the other’s, and increasingly, the corporate dollars pour in (another form of handicapping, or maybe just plain old knee-capping). You know the routine. These days, with the election a mere six months away, Romney/Obama “analysis” and prediction is already in the stratosphere and no issue, from war to a blind self-taught Chinese lawyer escaping to the American embassy in Beijing, is election-proof.
It’s all grist for the mill and who in Washington isn’t reading the polls the way a New Ager might read Tarot cards? So when President Obama suddenly starts talking — quite voluntarily — about global warming as a campaign issue, you know something’s up. What’s up, it turns out, is public concern over climate change after years of polling in which Americans claimed to be ever less worried about the phenomenon.
No one should be surprised, given this overheated year in North America, as Bill McKibben points out in today’s post. In fact, in the latest climate-change polling, 63% of respondents believe “the United States should move forward to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of what other countries do.” In another recent poll, 65% of Americans backed the idea of “imposing mandatory controls on carbon dioxide emissions/other greenhouse gases” (as75% now support regulating carbon dioxide as a “pollutant”).This is something new in America. Times, like the weather, are evidently a-changin’. And the president has noticed this, especially since he’s facing an opponent who, last fall, went on the record this way: “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climat
e change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.”
So this may be a bullish campaign season for climate change. “I suspect,” said the president, “that over the next six months, this is going to be a debate that will become part of the campaign, and I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way.” It could even help win him the election, if this summer and fall prove just as weather-freaky as our North American winter and spring have been, leaving Republican climate-change deniers and prevaricators in the dust.If, in a far less propitious political moment, one person put climate change back on the White House agenda and made the president attend to it, that would be TomDispatch regular Bill McKibben. The campaign of mass action he launched against the Keystone XL Pipeline and the particularly “dirty” form of energy it was slated to bring from Canada to the U.S. Gulf coast proved crucial. Let’s hope, like the cavalry, that he arrived in the nick of time. Tom Engelhardt
Too Hot Not to Notice? A Planet Connected by Wild Weather By Bill McKibben
The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by a giant’s fist, and most obvious of all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.
The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the raging river was Vermont’s iconic image from its worst disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed Hurricane Irene’s rampage through the state in August 2011. It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut more than a billion-dollar swath of destruction across the eastern United States.
I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having beenarrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline. Since Vermont’s my home, it took the theoretical — the ever more turbulent, erratic, and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure — and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.
And I’m not the only one.
New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” No less striking, 35% of the respondents reported that extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011. As Yale’s Anthony Laiserowitz told the New York Times, “People are starting to connect the dots.”
Which is what we must do. As long as this remains one abstract problem in the long list of problems, we’ll never get to it. There will always be something going on each day that’s more important, including, if you’re facing flood or drought, the immediate danger.
But in reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that’s going on every single day. If we could only see that pattern we’d have a fighting chance. It’s like one of those trompe l’oeil puzzles where you can only catch sight of the real picture by holding it a certain way. So this weekend we’ll be doing our best to hold our planet a certain way so that the most essential pattern is evident. At 350.org, we’re organizing a global day of action that’s all about dot-connecting; in fact, you can follow the action at climatedots.org.The day will begin in the Marshall Islands of the far Pacific, where the sun first rises on our planet, and where locals will hold a daybreak underwater demonstration on their coral reef already threatened by rising seas. They’ll hold, in essence, a giant dot — and so will our friends in Bujumbura, Burundi, where March flooding destroyed 500 homes. In Dakar, Senegal, they’ll mark the tidal margins of recent storm surges. In Adelaide, Australia, activists will host a “dry creek regatta” to highlight the spreading drought down under.
Pakistani farmers — some of the millions driven from their homes by unprecedented flooding over the last two years — will mark the day on the banks of the Indus; in Ayuthaya, Thailand, Buddhist monks will protest next to a temple destroyed by December’s epic deluges that also left the capital, Bangkok, awash.
Activists in Ulanbataar will focus on the ongoing effects of drought in Mongolia. In Daegu, South Korea, students will gather with bags of rice and umbrellas to connect the dots between climate change, heavy rains, and the damage caused to South Korea’s rice crop in recent years. In Amman, Jordan, Friends of the Earth Middle East will be forming a climate dot on the shores of the Dead Sea to draw attention to how climate-change-induced drought has been shrinking that sea.
In Herzliya, Israel, people will form a dot on the beach to stand in solidarity with island nations and coastal communities around the world that are feeling the impact of climate change. In newly freed Libya, students will hold a teach-in. In Oman, elders will explain how the weather along the Persian Gulf has shifted in their lifetimes. There will be actions in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, and in the highlands of Peru where drought has wrecked the lives of local farmers. In Monterrey, Mexico, they’ll recall last year’s floods that did nearly $2 billion in damage. In Chamonix, France, climbers will put a giant red dot on the melting glaciers of the Alps.
And across North America, as the sun moves westward, activists in Halifax, Canada, will “swim for survival” across its bay to highlight rising sea levels, while high-school students in Nashville, Tennessee, will gather on a football field inundated by 2011’s historic killer floods.
In Portland, Oregon, city dwellers will hold an umbrella-decorating party to commemorate March’s record rains. In Bandelier, New Mexico, firefighters in full uniform will remember last year’s record forest fires and unveil the new solar panels on their fire station. In Miami, Manhattan, and Maui, citizens will line streets that scientists say will eventually be underwater. In the high Sierra, on one of the glaciers steadily melting away, protesters will unveil a giant banner with just two words, a quote from that classic of western children’s literature, The Wizard of Oz. “I’m Melting” it will say, in letters three-stories high.
This is a full-on fight between information and disinformation, between the urge to witness and the urge to cover-up. The fossil-fuel industry has fundedendless efforts to confuse people, to leave an impression that nothing much is going on. But — as with the tobacco industry before them — the evidence has simply gotten too strong.
Once you saw enough people die of lung cancer, you made the connection. The situation is the same today. Now, it’s not just the scientists and theinsurance industry; it’s your neighbors. Even pleasant weather starts to seem weird. Fifteen thousand U.S. temperature records were broken, mainly in the East and Midwest, in the month of March alone, as a completely unprecedented heat wave moved across the continent. Most people I met enjoyed the rare experience of wearing shorts in winter, but they were still shaking their heads. Something was clearly wrong and they knew it.
The one institution in our society that isn’t likely to be much help in spreading the news is… the news. Studies show our papers and TV channels paying ever less attention to our shifting climate. In fact, in 2011 ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox spent twice as much time discussing Donald Trump as global warming. Don’t expect representatives from Saturday’s Connect the Dots day to show up on Sunday’s talk shows. Over the last three years, those inside-the-Beltway extravaganzas have devoted 98 minutes total to the planet’s biggest challenge. Last year, in fact, all the Sunday talk shows spent exactly nine minutes of Sunday talking time on climate change — and here’s a shock: all of it was given over to Republican politicians in the great denial sweepstakes.
So here’s a prediction: next Sunday, no matter how big and beautiful the demonstrations may be that we’re mounting across the world, “Face the Nation” and “Meet the Press” won’t be connecting the dots. They’ll be gassing along about Newt Gingrich’s retirement from the presidential race or Mitt Romney’s coming nomination, and many of the commercials will come from oil companies lying about their environmental efforts. If we’re going to tell this story — and it’s the most important story of our time — we’re going to have to tell it ourselves.
Bill McKibben, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, ofEaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, is the founder of 350.org, which is coordinating Saturday’s Connect the Dots day. You can find the event nearest you by checking climatedots.org.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook.
Copyright 2012 Bill McKibben -
The first dots on May 5th: Majuro Atoll, Marshall Islands
Posted: Thu, 03 May 2012 06:03:40 +0000
As the sunrises on Saturday, 5th of May, there will be a gathering held on Majuro Atoll — in the North Pacific nation of the Marshall Islands – unlike any other there before. The people there will arrive carrying large cardboard-cut-out dots, and as the sun creeps over the horizon, they’ll hold them up high while the local reverend will start chanting a prayer for the day.It sounds like it could be some sort of local ritual, but rest-assured it’s not. It is in fact a sort of global ritual – a blessing for the hundreds of events across more than 100 countries taking place on that day for Climate Impacts Day. The dots are especially important – at each of those hundreds of events people will be holding dots up to in a bid to help the world ‘connect the dots’ between the recent deluge of extreme weather events and climate change.
Walking from one side of Majuro Atoll to the other takes just a couple of minutes, so over the coming decades residents will have to start planning for relocation to a place higher above sea-level. Already since 1993, they have seen of 7mm (0.3inches) per year – which is twice the global average. This is set to keep on increasing. But on Saturday, they’re raising dots to connect the fact that about one quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted by humans each year is absorbed by the oceans. This extra carbon dioxide reacts with seawater and causes the ocean to become gradually more acidic. And this coupled with the increasing temperature of the oceans is and will continue to put a tremendous strain on coral reefs in the Marshall Islands. It’s those reefs that provide the food and livelihoods for much of the Marshall Island’s population.
I arrived in Majuro last night to be part of the opening ceremony on Saturday, from where we’ll be loading up footage to global broadcasters. There’s also a team of divers here who will be taking a dot down to a coral reef and getting footage with underwater cameras. But the other reason I have arrived in Majuro is that starting today we have an action packed two days of 350 climate leadership workshop.
One of our amazing organisers from Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), Mary-Linda Salvador has travelled with me as a facilitator-in-training so our partners in FSM – the Conservation Society of Pohnpei (who Mary-Linda works for) and the Micronesia Conservation Trust can continue training local organisers themselves. They’ve got plenty of momentum building in FSM. Just yesterday we wrapped up a 2-day workshop in Pohnpei with 35 young people. It was remarkable to see how many of the participants who may not have spoken in front of a large group before start to step up and speak their voice. By the end of the workshop, the participants were super charged for their action on Saturday and in the months and years ahead.
But back to here in Majuro Atoll and the Sunrise ceremony on Saturday – it’s no light task – because so many of the impacts we have seen from extreme weather in the last couple of years have devastated and killed, carrying a great cost to life on Earth. Remember the 20 million refugees from flooding in Pakistan, Thailand, Fiji and countless other places? The hundreds of deaths from the wildfires in Russia and Australia?
Joining a Climate Impacts Day event on Saturday May 5th is one of the most important ways that you can help prevent this extreme weather from irreversibly tightening its grip on our planet. So check out climatedots.org and get your dots ready!
Source: Sea-level and ocean acidification/warming source: http://www.cawcr.gov.au/projects/PCCSP/
-
Getting the Media to Connect the Dots
Posted: Thu, 03 May 2012 02:29:14 +0000
We’re hard at work here at 350.org writing press releases, typing up media advisories, and pitching the media to cover this weekend’s “Connect the Dots” events. I took some time this afternoon to write up a few thoughts for the Huffington Post on how all of us can work together as a network to transform public understanding of climate change from a future nuisance to a clear and present danger.
Over the last year, millions of people around the world have felt first-hand the impacts of the growing climate crisis. From devastating flooding in Thailand to historic drought in Texas, global warming has moved from an abstraction to a dangerous new reality. Here in the United States, 82 percent of Americans say that they’ve experienced a natural disaster or extreme weather event first-hand.
Yet, despite a few notable exceptions, the mainstream media has failed to connect the dots between this string of extreme weather events and global warming. Instead, coverage of climate change has dropped precipitously. A recent report by Media Matters for America found out that nightly news coverage on the major networks decreased 72 percent between 2009 and 2011. The Sunday shows, traditionally seen as forums for discussing the “important issues” of the day, have all spent more time covering Donald Trump than they have climate change.
If the mainstream media won’t connect the dots, then it’s up to the rest of us to try. This Saturday, 350.org’s global network of volunteers, activists, and organizations are hosting over 1,000 events in more than 100 countries to “connect the dots” between extreme weather and climate change.
Firefighters in New Mexico will hold posters with dots in a forest ravaged by wildfires, while divers in the Marshall Islands take a dot underwater to their dying coral reefs. On glaciers in the Alps, Andes, and Sierras, climbers will unfurl dots on melting glaciers with the simple message: “I’m Melting.” Villagers in Northeastern Kenya will create dots to show how ongoing drought is killing their crops, while city-dwellers in Rio de Janeiro hold dots where mudslides from unusually heavy rains wiped out part of their neighborhood. The list goes on.
Here at 350 HQ, we’ll be doing our best to collect photos and videos from the events, edit them together into slideshows and b-roll in record time, get them moving across social media, and push content out to mainstream news networks. If we’re successful, Saturday will be another big step forward in waking the world up to the urgent threat of the climate crisis.
It’s this type of online-to-offline, new-to-traditional media mash-up that I think holds some promise for those of us who are struggling to move climate change from a low public priority to a top-tier political concern. We’ll never have the big advertising budgets of the fossil fuel industry, but we can assemble enough cell-phone cameras, Flickr feeds, and YouTube videos to show people how climate change is a clear and present danger rather than some nuisance for the future.
Over the last few years coordinating our communications here at 350.org, I’ve seen how citizen-powered journalism can help push the mainstream media to cover the climate crisis. The day before our first global day of action in 2009, we got a skype call from our organizers in Ethiopia who told us that they were about to have a march with 15,000 school children in the streets of Addis Ababa to call for action on climate change, but that they didn’t have anyone to film the demonstration and that there weren’t any international media outlets with cameras in the city. A few Skype calls later, my colleague Adam tracked down a friend of a friend of a friend who happened to be in Addis with a camera. She quickly hopped on her bicycle, filmed the rally, found high-speed Internet at a hotel bar (ordered a drink so she could use it for free), uploaded the footage to us in New York, we cut it into b-roll in iMovie, sent it over to CNN, and they put it on the air a few hours later.
In 2010, we turned to artists like Thom Yorke and Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada to help get the message across. They designed images large enough to be photographed by satellite and we brought together thousands of people to form the pictures on the ground. Imagine the logistics involved in organizing hundreds of people to form a “human river” in the desert outside Santa Fe while timing the whole thing to coincide with a satellite flying overhead at over 100 mph — then times that by 12 different events across the planet. The art worked: outlets around the world picked up the pictures and ran with them.
Last August, during the White House sit-ins against the Keystone XL pipeline, we only began to get media coverage after days of our own photographers and videographers cranking out photos and videos of everyday citizens being led away in handcuffs. Now, hardly a day goes by without an article about the pipeline and the latest political ploy to revive that zombie.This Saturday will be a unique challenge. It’s been just over a month since we sent out the invitation for Climate Impacts Day. We’re still finding typos and glitches on the website, scrambling to get together updated press lists, and find enough hours in the day to coordinate more than 1,000 events spanning nearly every continent (still working on an Antarctic action). But all across the world people have picked up the theme and are organizing with incredible creativity. As it turns out, in many places around the world, people already deeply understand between the floods that wiped out their village or the drought that killed their crop and the pollution that the fossil fuel industry is spewing out day after day.
They’ve connected the dots. We’ll see if the mainstream media can too.
Follow Jamie Henn on Twitter: www.twitter.com/agent350
Related articles
- Connect the Dots on May 5 (planetsave.com)
- Connecting the dots on climate change (chrisriedy.me)
- Climate: Scientists are starting to connect the dots between global warming and extreme weather (summitcountyvoice.com)
- Climate change is here – and worse than we thought (bangordailynews.com)
The Free 